gdenby
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Posts posted by gdenby
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If I have a bunch of underlying layers, then I create a new layer (that I intend to add type to), after I click on the type tool and then onto the document the "selected layer" shifts from the "new layer" to one of the previously built underlying layers.
Bill
You don't need to add a new layer to add a text layer. Just select frame text, and draw the box. It creates a text layer on top of everything else. For whatever reason, when I try to add a text box after making a blank layer, sometimes it goes in a previous layer, or sometime the new one. If the blank layer is highlighted in the layers panel, the text box layer goes in there.
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D-loaded it a couple of days ago, got around to reading thru it last night. Good work. I particularly liked the "use" category. You have a few I hadn't though of, and it was good to learn.
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Are you perhaps clicking on a portion of the underlying design, and not within the text frame?
In Preferences/User Interface, is "Show Selection in Layers Panel" checked? That way, you will know if the text panel layer and not something else has been clicked.
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Do you get the same result if you download the image and open it in PSE, instead of pasting a screenshot?
Yup, just about the same. see attached image w. the sample image as reported in PSE.
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I gotta say, trying to match the pantone color from a screen image is not anywhere near exact. Or at least so complex that is very irritating. Doing a screen cap of Alfred's image, for instance, and putting it into Photoshop Elements, the RGB reading were close, but not the same. Off by average 10. Thinking to myself, do I need to calibrate my screen? Do I need to assign a different profile to the down load images? Etc...
Also, online images for the Pantone colors don't match the ones suggested in the responses.
My suggestion to MediSpera is to make a good copy in Affinity. Print it out, and see how close it is to an example of the original logo. If it doesn't work well, try again till its good enough. Then, if necessary, go to a printer who has a current Pantone swatch book, and do a best match under illumination w. best CRI. When its close enough, write the Pantone numbers in stone, and don't let them get separated from the vector work.
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There is no 1 to 1 match between Pantone colors and cmyk colors. AFAIK, Pantone is based on specific pigments on different paper stocks, why cmyk is an ideal color space not limited to the physical reflectance of pigment chemicals.
Affinity does include a wide variety of Pantone colors as swatches in the color settings dialogue. I suppose you could try a visual match, tho' there are hundreds of swatches. I just made a sample from the lightest color in the image, and found a close. but not perfect match. See attached.
There are a few online CMYK to Pantone matching utilities, but the results are approximate. You might take samples of the image in Affinity, and see what the data matches using those utilities.
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Is there a use case for needing to lock the length? Locking direction is important for maintaining direction of the opposite handle in smoothed points (in typography, for example), but if you change the direction it affects the curve in ways that often requires additional simultaneous adjustment of the length.
The short of it is that there are only so many modifier keys available to us, so there needs to be a common use case in order to justify taking that modifier combination.
I often spend quite a lot of time getting nodes adjusted to right where I want them, and accidentally nudge them, or a line segment while continuing to work on other adjacent areas of the shape. Either locking a handle, or the whole node would save me some time. Not crucial, just beneficial.
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Not knowing exactly what you are trying to do, I'll suggest you look at the tutorial vids for "power duplicate," and perhaps working w. symbols.
It is worth mentioning that the boolean operations which can combine, add, divide object, etc, do not work as often expected when used with a closed shape like a circle, and a straight line, which is a stroke that does no enclose an area. But 2 such objects can be grouped together, and moved.
Any layer object or group when locked cannot be manipulated.
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Any stroke in AD can have a brush replace the plain line. With the ellipse selected, look at the upper left hand of the tool context bar at the top of the work area. Click on the stroke dialogue button. Click on the little brush icon on the right, the textured brush option. Or go over to the right of the screen where there are buttons labeled color, swatches, stroke, and brushes, and do the same thing there w. the stroke dialogue. Then click nest to it to get access to the available brushes. There are 7 included image brushes as samples. One can make ones own brushes, and there are a number of users who have donated or sell brushes they have made.
If you have Photo, the is a file menu that will open the vector work for editing in Photo. However, Designer has quite a few operations in common w. Photo, and you may be able to do what you need in Designer alone.
1 of the reasons I bought Designer was its fine selection of bitmap painting and manipulation tools.
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While it is difficult to decide in 10 days when you work 40+ hours a week, I've figured most of it out using an Illustrator tutorial, as this is why I wanted AD. There is a company I love to buy from who has freebies and tutorials for Illustrator. I would love to do them and learn more about vectors, but $20 a month for a program you will never own goes against my grain. Affinity Designer was recommended. I love it, but for two things I can not figure out. I asked those questions in the forum. If my trial runs out, that's fine.. I was able to work through the tutorial, which touched on many parts of AD. Once my questions are answered, I'll know if I want to buy.. and then I have 14 days to return. So the trial period is do-able. Plus, AD has so many tutorials on it's own that are so much more complex, I'm going to have to have it anyway, I'm sure. Thank goodness Mother's Day is this weekend. ;)
Yes, it can be hard to find spare time. 24 days, w. maybe an hour a day should give a good idea of what the program can do. There's quite a bit already in AD, and given that the purchase guarantees all the version additions to v. 2, new features will be available for an investment of probably less than .10/day. Hard to beat that.
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Hi my name is Gareth and I am a motion graphic designer.
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I come from the Amiga days of design and animation, so I love to see new thinking and inventiveness in my tools.
Hi, fellow Amiga-naut. May the guru be with you. Started w. Deluxe Paint, but soon concentrated on 3D via Turbo Silver.
I'm using Affinity Designer, may get to Photo. Most fun I've had in 30 some years. Its sweet software.
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The vector brush strokes are bitmaps that conform to a vector curve. At present, Affinity doesn't trace bitmaps. There are quite a few apps that do, costing between $0 - $7, and its probably a better choice to use those rather than have Serif spend time duplicating them rather than adding valuable features like symbols and constraints.
Just an observation on my part. I don't often see a need for such a conversion. If I want "naturalistic" strokes, it seems starting w. bitmap samples, and smoothly interpolating them will give good output, thats the way to go. The possibility of large number of geometric variations is fascinating, but having on hand a 100 thousand bitmaps that can be attached to a stroke seems a decent substitution.
Also, try messing around with the stroke pressure variable. The vector outline can be made quite complex for any single curve, and groups of curves can have large variations.
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I actuary tried that way but I gave up because every time when I edit the shape of curve, I need to do twice...
There can be layers w. just fills and layers w. just strokes than can have their shapes outline adjusted all at once. Make a shape. Duplicate. Duplicate, etc. Use different fills, fx. Make different strokes. Select all layers, and using the node tool, select and move node(s) and all layer objects will change shape together.
But the node controls don't change all at once.
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It is a known rendering problem. A work around is to add a stroke of the same color.
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Another quick example of using divide. The word "BREAK" in bauhaus font, divided by a grid of equal size squares. Would have been a bit more work to turn it into finer confetti, so the curves were less obvious, but it seems the divide works pretty well. Quick, and producing very small numbers of nodes.
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I was under the impression that working w. higher bit depths was generally a good idea because digital sensors would provide a better sampling at the higher bit depth for dark image areas. That way, detail might be brought out of shadow.
If one knows from the start that the final output will be limited, then I would suppose it doesn't hurt to work within those limits.
So far, I haven't noticed major slow downs unless I'm working w a few thousand vectors, or trying to paint w. brushes at 1500 px. But I'm not involved in production at this point, and so loosing a few minutes here and there is not crucial.
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Scaling a bit depth down can produce quite good results. The page R C-R refers to on bit depth does a good job showing what happens to a high bit depth is down sampled. Sampling up can be done, but the results are usually poor. The up-sampling routine has to add in data, typically creating a blurry image, and most likely banding where the data samples are to far apart for the interpolation routine. So, it is always best to work at the highest bit depth available.
You might like to read the wikipedia articles on the RGB color model, and the associated one on High Dynamic Range (HDR), which Affinity supports. I don't know if the gradients available for vector fills are internally stored at the higher range, or are limited to the 24 bit schemes shown in the gradient dialogues.
As a by the way, the only system I ever saw that had 4 bit display was a Commodore VIC-20 that my uncle bought circa 1982.
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I'm using AD, not AP, and I don't often use the pixel persona tools. If you are using AP I expect the pixel selection is much the same. Here's what I know. You must be working w. a pixel layer. I'm unclear about the difference between a pixel layer and an image layer. Image layers, tho' pixels need to be rasterized.
Use the rectangle tool, or ellipse, whatever, and define the area. Then use the move tool (arrow) and click on the defined space. That turns it into an editable object that can be cleared by delete, or copied and pasted in the standard manner.
I suppose it works this way because the selected area can be placed over multiple layers, and then each layer can have a different treatment.
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Not very dandelion like, started w. a 200 ray star, curved limbs, and did a boolean subtraction from a circle, and then subtracted that from another circle, and cut away a few points.
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Hi, iMac1943,
Rasterization is different. Rasterization turns vector objects into a pixel bitmap thru a process called rasterization.
What you want, it you want individual dots is to either create an array of vector dots placed within the parent vector, or use a bitmap fill. For the bitmap, do a search on B&W ben day dots.
AFAIK, AD doesn't output patterns like that.
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Hi, Licorne,
At present, Affinity Designer doesn't have the function. It requires auto tracing, which is planned by v 2.0 according to the road map.
Depending on what you are trying to do, using various pixel selection tools, and then using the refine edge command will allow output of separate layers, or masks fro the selection. Those can then be used for fx, adjustments and blends. But the shape will remain a fixed proportion.
AD: Cut out text in circle
in Pre-V2 Archive of Affinity on Desktop Questions (macOS and Windows)
Posted
Something like this?
Simple. Draw the circle. It will need to be the bottom layer. If you have the right font, use the Artistic Text tool to type the letters, and then use the convert to curves button on the right of the tool context bar. If you don't have the font, I suppose you will need to hand draw the text.
When the text is converted to curves, it will be a "group." Open the group in the layers panel, select each letter and the circle all together. Then just use the boolean subtract operation.
In the sample, I additionally rotated, stretched and skewed the text before subtraction.